1. Technical Field
Aspects of the present invention relate to a printing apparatus, and more specifically to a printing apparatus capable of detecting an obstacle such as a crease and dust on a recording medium.
2. Related Art
When a piece of fabric is used as a recording medium in a conventional inkjet printing apparatus having a platen to hold the recording medium while the platen is driven in a direction perpendicular with respect to a direction wherein the recording medium is moved, a surface of the fabric may often have obstacles such as dust thereon or a crease to obstruct ink from being ejected onto the surface. In order to prevent printing quality of the printing apparatus to be deteriorated by the obstacles, an inkjet printing apparatus having a detecting system to detect the obstacles prior to a printing operation has been provided. An example of such an inkjet printing apparatus is disclosed in Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2005-199507.
In the above-referenced inkjet apparatus, the detecting system scans not only an area on the fabric to be printed but the entire platen even when the area to be printed is merely a part of the platen. Thus, an area whereon printing is not applied is unnecessarily scanned, and thereby longer time is required to complete the scanning operation. If the fabric as a recording medium has raised parts such as a collar and a pocket in an area outside the area to be printed, the raised parts are detected by the detecting system against a user's intention. Therefore, the user is required to pay attention to the area of the fabric to be placed on the platen so that the raised parts should not be placed on the platen when the fabric is set or to stop the scanning operation before the detecting system starts scanning the raised parts.